"The house was a porn studio for 65 years, and a bit of a hedonistic enclave. There was music and parties and politics, lots of art and lots of artists. It had a really special history, and I wanted to honour that backstory. And there was definitely some Julie & Julia thing going on with me and the house, because I was broken and falling apart, and the house was too. We were both desperately in need of some repair. So as I started restoring it, it was also very much about – maybe without even knowing it – doing the same to myself.

I thought really hard about how I wanted to feel in the spaces, as opposed to how I wanted them to look. I thought very selfishly about how I wanted to live. I’d had two decades of working hard and going out all the time and doing stuff I didn’t want to do. I became a very private person, so I chose not to have a guest bedroom; I don’t want people to stay here! I wanted a giant bathtub where I could have a bath twice a day, with a fire. I wanted every room and all the showers to have giant windows open to the garden, so wherever you are you can hear the birds and smell the flowers. And then there’s this mixture of surfaces – the cold marble and rough concrete and spiky wood – the idea of waking up your sense of touch as well. And colour, so much colour! Nature is about colour and I’m so fatigued by beige homes and that bland aesthetic. I wanted this to feel like Ken Done’s work – colourful, but also sophisticated."

“Flamingo Estate started with very selfishly making things; we’ve never made anything I didn’t want to use myself. And the pleasure used to be this feeling of what happens when you pour it out of the bottle. Now, a lot of the pleasure we’re getting is what happens to get it in the bottle, the impact that we’re having with all local farms, the Indigenous communities we harvest from, all the environmental work that we’re doing, the money we give back to those people. It’s really nice for me, having spent my whole career selling people shit they didn’t need, to now make stuff that is helping a lot of people out. It feels good. I tell everyone at work, we’re not making candles, we’re in the hospitality business. It’s our job to make people feel loved and warm. I want to feel that way; I want to come home and light a fire and have a glass of wine and then drift off to sleep and feel really nurtured. [Prioritising pleasure] does take a little bit of practice. It doesn’t happen by itself, but it shouldn’t; that’s also the nice part about it.”

“Initially, I came to Los Angeles quite lonely, and Flamingo Estate started as a way to slowly bring myself back to life. I wanted to get back in touch with my body. I wanted to have sex again; I wanted to feel sexy. In New York it had been all about what I thought people would think of me; I wanted to look skinny, I wanted to look cute, all that stuff. A lot of that self-talk is also about restriction – what you shouldn’t do, what you shouldn’t eat – and restriction is never sexy. But all that just sort of fell away here. Now I think it’s about abundance. Have the cheese. Drink the glass of wine. Eat the steak. Double down on what feels good. I think everyone knows in their hearts and in their bodies what that thing is for them, and silencing everyone else’s opinion is, for me at least, the very first step to that. We’ve always said that Flamingo Estate is a home of radical pleasure. And I think the radical part is putting yourself first and standing up for your own pleasure in a way that you don’t need to feel embarrassed about. My goal now is to ripen, it’s to ripen like a peach and, you know, I don’t mind if my skin gets soft on the outside, I just want to get sweet and juicy in the middle and ripen as much as I can.”